Category Archives: Homesteading

Today is one of those blustery winter days that remind me yeah, it’s still winter. Blast it.

Which is what it’s doing out there — blasting frigid winter wind that shoots down the barrel of my valley and through the walls of my straw bale house. Making me vow, yet once more, to finish plastering the place.

But wait! Before I plaster I’ve got to move the stuff of my daily life out of the house. I’ve made big inroads into that, but every time something gets shuttled to the barn I find I want it back in here. Too late, though, because once it’s piled in the barn it’s lost to the ages. I made a big attempt in the beginning to segregate by use, but that went by the wayside. Now it’s all wherever and so I can only find things that are on the top of the stacks.

I don’t like not having my stuff around me. I’m a person of impulse. If I get the urge to mess with fabric I want to do it now, not some day after I’ve plastered and can set up my sewing area again. If I want to reread a favorite book I want to be able to go to the shelf and grab it and settle in with it, not ask the library for it and if I’m lucky get to hold that book in my hands next week when I’m in town.

So much — too much, it feels like — gets put off because I need to plaster. Even writing.

On days like today, when my valley is creating its own polar vortex right through my house, my fingers get stiff with cold. It’s frustrating to try to type or write with stiff fingers, as time-honored a tradition it might be. Yeah, I’ve got a big fire in the wood stove and the eco-fan is spinning. My desk, unfortunately, is just far away enough that the the heat barely makes it. One of the drawbacks of wood heat in these circumstances is that sitting next to the fire is too close for comfort, and anywhere else is uncomfortably chilly.

So what am I going to do about it? Get up, move around. Make bread and let the bubbles rise in my brain. Or (oh ewwww) wash the dishes. Or tackle any number of tasks that leave my mind free to identify thoughts, test phrasing, compose sentences. When my fingers are warm enough, sit down and write until I can’t move my fingers anymore.

It’s actually a good practice for me. Otherwise I tend to sit obsessively at the computer and never get up — bad for my body plus it allows sludge to build up in my head. If only I could remember to do this when the wind’s not blowing.

Meanwhile, about the bread

I started a no-knead bread dough four days ago. I wanted to try fermenting the flour/water mix in my never-ending quest for making the perfect loaf of sourdough. Fermenting might not be the correct word for what I was doing but I’m too lazy to look it up. Anyway, the ferment was — how to put it? Ugly. It was ugly and it was alive. Well, yeah, yeast has to be alive to do its thing but…that alive? By the way, the brew in that brief video clip is NOT boiling. That’s just the action of the yeast in room temp flour/water!

Hoping for the best, I added small amounts of flour over the next couple of days and then yesterday a.m. added some more yeast, some salt, and enough flour to make the proper consistency dough. Sorry, I can’t share my quantities because I totally winged it, but I used a bit of rye, and some whole wheat, and mostly white flour (organic, of course!), plus a wee bit of salt and some bread yeast.

This morning the risen dough had started to slump so I decided it was time to bake it. I didn’t have high hopes for this experiment but boy, was I wrong. It was still not sour, which is my goal. But you know… it’s kind of … mmmmmm…..

Update on Isabelle. She doesn’t live with me anymore. Aha — bet that comes as a surprise. But there’s a story to it (of course there is) and when you know it I think you’ll agree that not only is Izzy a traveler but that it’s right that she’s now called Bella. I believe she’s going to be very happy in New York instead of New Mexico.

If you read about my anxieties prior to going to Grand Canyon, you’ll remember that one of them was about Izzy, who by that point I’d only had for three weeks. I was concerned she’d feel abandoned by me. In the Grand Canyon post, though, I did acknowledge that my sister and brother-in-law love dogs and were looking forward to spending time with Izzy. That she would be loved on. That she’d get to go in the truck with them, go on walks with them, and would sleep near them at night.

Hah! Little did I know how right on I was! Rather than feel abandoned, Izzy decided Dede and Jeff were the best thing since cats’ kibble.

My sister and brother-in-law own property south of Pie Town and they love to visit it and hike all over it whenever they are in New Mexico. While they were here they kept Izzy with them all the time. They took her back to my place to feed horses and cats, she went with them into town, and her bed was set up next to their bed. Not only that, but they took her on long hikes on their property.

Izzy knew a good deal when she met one. In this case, two good deals: two people who loved on her and fussed over her and who made her forget all about wondering where I might be.

I was keeping in touch with Dede & Jeff from Grand Canyon and didn’t pay that much attention when Jeff mentioned having fallen in love with Izzy. I thought, well of course, she’s a lovable dog. But then Jeff casually mentioned he was thinking about not flying back home to NY with Dede, but instead driving back with Izzy.

Ha ha. I thought he was joking. But he was not.

Isabelle in the navigator’s seat, with Jeff on their way to New York

Laura and I got home on Friday afternoon. Saturday morning Jeff took off with Isabelle. He said he needed to get back to work on Monday but I think he really wanted to leave right away in case I changed my mind.

I don’t think they believed I’d let her go, not when I loved her so much. Fact is, I love her so much that I would let two people I love have her because they love her, too. And because Isabelle said she wanted to go with them.

So having traveled from Oklahoma to me in New Mexico, Jeff and Isabelle took of from New Mexico headed for New York. She started out in the back seat, but you can see from the photo how long that lasted.

So now the traveler dog has a new home, a new life, and a new nickname, Bella. Izzy is a kind of sharp sounding name, but Isabelle is such a lovely and sweet dog that a lovely and sweet name seems to fit her better. So Bella is what everyone is calling her now.

I am happy for Dede and Jeff and, their family, including their older dog, Yuna. I don’t feel that Bella has been lost to me, but that she gained more of me. She gained family that I love.

And of course, Bella’s biggest gift to me is still with me. She got me over the hump of thinking I could never open my heart to another dog again.

Next month I will have lived in my straw bale house for twenty years. In all that time I haven’t managed to finish it — specifically, I have barely started the plastering. That would be the step that makes the straw bale house so incredibly insulated and worth the effort of going with straw bale in the first place.

So for just about twenty years I’ve been living in a structure that is basically not much more insulated than a tent. Wind blows right through the spaces between the bales, no matter how much I stuff those spaces with more straw and (lately) plastic bags. The exterior end walls have one coat of plaster, but the plaster doesn’t extend all the way up to the tops of the walls where they meet the roof. Wind blows through the gaps between the rafters so that when the wind blows hard the house becomes well ventilated. The long side walls are just straw.

The stuff holds up remarkably well in this dry climate but really, it’s time.

Problem is, I always seem to find something better to do than plaster. Writing, for instance. Or making fabric art. Or messing with the horses or walking or reading. Becoming enraged by Facebook, Googling all kinds of nonsense… so many things.

Even if I decided to get a move on, twenty years of living in a house means that there’s furniture against the walls and artwork hanging from them. And that means that in order to plaster inside, everything has to be moved away from the wall being worked on. In a tiny house it becomes a challenge to figure out where things can be stashed out of the way, and that means the plastering gets put off.

But then I started hearing people talk about what was coming this winter. If forecasts are accurate (and that’s not a given) this winter is supposed to be snowy in the southwest. I decided I had better get on with it. Wood is expensive and I don’t have much stockpiled whereas I’ve already got the cement and lime and sand.

I figured to start with an inside corner of the house where my fabric is stashed, because certainly I could live without working on wall art for a while. I started by moving the plastic tubs of fabric out to the barn, though since I wasn’t all that enthusiastic about doing so it took several days. Then I started on the boxes of stuff on shelves that had been hidden by the fabric… and that took longer because there were treasures in those boxes that needed examining.

Old photos. Books I had forgotten I had. Art supplies. It was like Christmas and birthdays all at once — great fun, but very time consuming.

Finally I got the corner emptied except for a chest of drawers, but I was not about to move furniture to the barn — so that just got pushed out of the way. Not very far away as you can see from the photo. Maneuvering is a challenge in small spaces and I don’t like small spaces, but we gotta do what we gotta do.

I spent a whole day plastering this past weekend. Well, okay, most of a day. All right, about half a day. No matter, I worked till my arms felt like wet noodles and my back ached. One wheelbarrow load of mixed sand, cement, and lime yielded a discouragingly small amount of plaster on the wall: a section of about 4′ x 6′. Plus a section of wall outside , maybe 3′ x 3′, that used up the last of the plaster in the wheelbarrow without my having to go in and out of the house. Because there were now lots of flies in the house because I had to leave the door open so I could go in and out.Out out damn flies!

In the big scheme of things house flies (or in my case, more likely manure flies) have brief lifespans. When they are in the house, however, they are around way too long. I swatted some but that’s icky. I put up fly paper and within hours managed to get it stuck on my sleeve. With flies on it. Ewwwww! I think I will resort to vacuuming them up when the house is cooler and they won’t want to move. Meanwhile, I have to accept that I’ll be driven crazy by them for a while longer.

Does that mean I can’t plaster any more till it’s too cold for flies outside?

Bad idea. Stay tuned to see what I do about the plaster/fly dilemma.

Meanwhile, I have a burning desire to do fabric art, now that everything is turned topsy-turvy. In fact, I woke up in the morning having dreamed about new techniques I could use. So today I have decided it’s much too cold out to be messing with plaster, and much too warm out to discourage flies from coming in through the open door — but it’s just right to play with fabric.

Let me throw some more wood on the fire.

PS: For those who are actually more serious about straw bale construction than I am, I do plan to use wire mesh on the corners by doors and windows. That’s a project for another day.

It didn’t have to happen but what did I expect? I knew if I didn’t take defensive measures I’d lose them. There would ultimately be no escape because they were besieged by an enemy that had the patience of one who had felt hunger before and would feel it again.

But still. It was hard to imagine being consumed alive. Down the gullet. Inevitable, yes, but still.

Years ago in a science fiction book I read this one line that has stuck with me ever since: all things eat, all things are eaten. I wish I could remember where I read it because it is a concept I have to remind myself about all the time.

When I saw the oily slick on the water and when the mare went to drink and no fish congregated around her lips I knew all were gone. Last night they were there, this morning, sometime before I went out to feed, probably while the gentle rain fell through the gloom of dawn, a great blue heron had paused on its way south to fortify itself for the rest of its flight.

I could not begrudge the bird, and it was my fault that there were no survivors. I could have put screen over the center of the trough but I didn’t. Some of those fish were ten years and more old. Now they were calories fueling a bird.

PS — 10/16 Good news! There are a couple goldfish left. Understandably, they are unwilling to come up to a horse’s lips in search of food right now.

Peaches. That’s what’s on my mind. Last week I was given a couple dozen of them by a friend, freshly picked off his tree and handed over in a brown grocery bag where they would ripen. A couple days ago I remembered to check them and they were ready to go.

In the past I’ve made jams and liqueurs, but as yummy as they’ve been I didn’t want to do that again, particularly since I still have over a quart of peach liqueur left from last year. The peaches couldn’t wait for me to decide what to do so I decided to dry them. Easy peasy and I love dried fruit, so that was the way to go.

Ron’s peaches were all at the same perfect stage of ripe, and they all were wonderfully free of bug and bird damage, as well as bruising. Processing them was simple: Clean as needed, remove any damaged spots, cut around the peach equator and twist to break the peach into two, then pry out the pit, and slice the halves. Pop the end pieces in my mouth and place the rest on the dryer trays.

My dryer is the old fashioned kind — its contents are air dried. The drying takes longer than it would with an electric dehydrator but mine doesn’t use any power and I live in a dry climate so there’s no mold. The food being dried is protected from bugs and dust by a fine mesh cover that zips closed. The dryer is advertised as solar powered but I’ve hung mine inside the house, from the ceiling in my kitchen and have even rigged up a rope and pulley system so I don’t have to get on a ladder to check on how things are going.

Things are going nicely, two days later, as you can see. Maybe next week I’ll get to taste test. Yum!

It had been a brutal day, a hard edged wind coming from the north and cutting through the many layers she wore. Even when the sun broke through the heavy clouds it was cold, cold for late April. But here in the mountains of New Mexico weather was like that. Nothing unusual at all.

For a brief moment at sunset a rosy golden light limned the mesa top, gone as quickly as it had come. She smelled rain, but there was nothing yet to moisten the dust and the struggling grass that was already turning gray with thirst. It would come, though, she knew it. If she could smell it, it would come.

She built a fire in the wood stove, smiling at the fancy she’d had that she was done building fires till next fall. She settled into the evening, waiting.

The wind stopped. The world held its breath. Silently fluffy white flakes drifted down into the dusk, covering the branches of the apple trees that were only this morning braving the first bright green leaves of spring.

Yesterday it rained for the first time in I don’t know how long. Oh, I could readily find out — I do keep a weather journal. It didn’t rain much the last time. As of yesterday morning I had recorded under half an inch since the first of the year and as of last evening I had just 0.2″ more to add.

Last night it snowed. I woke up to two inches of wet white stuff. I have to be happy for that, because we so desperately need the moisture. But I had to cancel a trip into town. I wanted to pick up a load of alfalfa hay, and get some cat food. I’m out of bananas, and getting low on peanut butter. And [gasp!] I’m out of wine. But more importantly, I had to cancel the appointment for a massage.

Tragedy!

Okay, it’s not a great tragedy but it is a bit of a disappointment. I’m not in dire need of the massage and I won’t get to hang out in the coffee shop this afternoon with a book, a cup of coffee, and a pastry. The massage has been rescheduled and the coffee shop will be there next week, so it’s not the end of the world. It’s just one of those things when you go rural.

Living out here in the middle of nowhere means knowing that there could be days or weeks when going anywhere is not possible. It means thinking in advance, replenishing supplies before running out, and making do. If a person isn’t into the mentality of preparedness and self-sufficiency then this is not the kind of place to live.

In my case, today is more like a schoolkid’s snow day than anything else. I get to stay home. Yay! (That’s the hermit in me talking). And of course, I have what I need here to make the day even better. None of the things on my shopping list are things I’m in danger of running out of unless I couldn’t drive out for a good long time.

Except for the wine. A wine cellar’s on my To Do list, but I’m not there yet. I rarely have back-up wine. I’ll tough it out.

It’s a cold, dreary day, today. The snow has stopped and the melt has begun. It’ll be a snotty mess out there in a while. A good excuse to stay inside and snuggle up near the wood stove with a book. And maybe some comfort food. I’m thinking potato soup.

Look Ma! No recipe!

Making do happens when you can’t follow a recipe. Maybe you don’t have the ingredients, or the time, or that recipe just doesn’t appeal. In my case it seems to mean being constitutionally incapable of following directions. Oh, not because I couldn’t if I wanted to, but because it just seems so… um…

Let’s just say that some of us make our own excitement in life.

I’ve always been attracted to stories of people pushing the envelope of their very existence. Doesn’t matter where or when. It could be anybody, at any time, on whatever ocean or continent… or planet or galaxy. Shipwrecked folks, lost folks, explorers, pioneers — people who went where no others had gone before and who made do with what they had and what they could invent.

It takes a special kind of person to do that. I’ve always wanted to be a member of their ranks. But you know, I’ve got that hermit thing going, so that has put a crimp on what I might do. The thought of being stuck on an island or in a spaceship with a bunch of people who are in my face all the time is just too ewwww. Plus I’d get claustrophobic without wild, open spaces to roam.

So hey — I could be a mountain man, like Grizzly Adams as portrayed by Dan Haggerty (I met him years back, seemed like a nice guy). Except I don’t live in the mountains and I’m a woman, and no training bears for me, thank you very much. Anyway those are just details. The point is a life of doing whatever I can for myself by myself. Not living by the book. Not just marching to a different drummer — but to my own drummer: me. Even if I can’t drum.

It’s a life of choosing to take a different road, maybe one that requires giving certain things up in order to have other things that are more important. From the outside it might look a lot like living a hard life for no reason, but from the inside what it feels like is playing.

Yes, playing. By that I mean, having fun doing something I’ve chosen to do the way I want to do it and enjoying what I’m doing just because I can.

So about that soup

Even if I had an excellent potato soup recipe I wouldn’t follow it. (I do have an excellent book of soup recipes entitled Soup, by Coralie Castle; 101 Productions; distributed by Scribner, New York 1971. It is out in a second edition published in 1996, too.) I don’t need to look in the book to know I probably don’t have all the ingredients, or if I do, I won’t want to use the ingredients called for. More importantly, seems to me that recipes are guidelines to someone else’s idea of what food should taste like. It’s like making a quilt using the exact fabrics and pattern that someone else has created, or painting-by-numbers.

Not saying that there’s anything wrong with doing those things, just that it’s not for me.

You know the supposedly ancient Chinese saying about giving a man a fish vs. teaching him how to fish? Well, teach me not only how to fish, but how to light a fire, and how to clean the fish, and how to fry or broil or stew, and you’ve taught me something truly useful. Which, by the way, is why the early editions of The Joy of Cooking are so wonderful — Irma Rombauer provided not just recipes but an explanation of the basic principles of cooking. That’s why that cookbook has been in print continuously since 1936 with over 18 million copies sold.

Teach me the principles of soup and I’ll make my own recipe.

So in case you want to know what I did, here it is, today’s recipe for potato soup, with annotations. Next time I won’t make it the same way. As for trying my recipe? Do what you will, that is the only advice (apology to Mr. Crowley)

Ingredients

5 potatoes of varying sizes I grabbed some potatoes that I forgot I had. They hadn’t gone green yet and that didn’t have lots of sprouts. Most of the rest will get planted when it’s warmer if they don’t go into the compost, darn it

1 onion It needed using before it needed to join the potatoes in the garden

3 large carrots because I like carrots

1 cup chopped kale because I had it, because it doesn’t store well and the horses won’t eat it, and because it would make the soup photo pretty

A few grinds of black pepper

1 TBS cumin because I love the taste

1 TBS Golden Paste (turmeric) because it’s good for me. You can use plain turmeric if you don’t have Golden Paste handy, or don’t put any in the soup at all

Some veggie oil

A big blob of butter

Secret ingredient: Left-over coffee from this morning

Water

Instructions

Heat the oil in a deep pan or a soup pot. Melt butter in the oil. Don’t let it get so hot it smokes!

Chop the onions into chunks and saute in the oil/ butter. While that’s cooking, do the potatoes. Don’t forget to stir every so often so nothing sticks to the pan.

Chop the potatoes into chunks and add to the onions. While that’s cooking, do the carrots.

Chop the carrots into smallish pieces and add to the onions/carrots. While that’s cooking, do the kale.

Chop the kale and stir into the rest.

Add the pepper, and the other spices if you like them.

Add the coffee (it was about 8 oz). I like coffee in my sauces and soups because it adds a nice dark color and some depth and richness to the taste. I tend to not bother with meat broths, which would do the same.

Add water to cover all ingredients and bring to a boil.

Cover and simmer on low till it’s getting mushy. Leave the lid cocked a little so the liquid reduces some, but watch that it doesn’t reduce too much and burn your veggies. My soup was started on the gas stove and finished on the wood stove.

OK, here’s the fun part. After the soup’s cooked a while but before it’s done you can start adjusting the taste. Be advised that it’s all subjective. I like to taste what I’ve got, imagine how it might be better (unless it’s perfect already) then add a few things that call to me.

My soup’s cooking right now. It needs a few hours of simmering, but it’s already tasting interesting. But you know the best part of this? However it turns out, it doesn’t matter. It wasn’t only ever about the eating part.

I’ll report later how the soup turns out, good or bad!

EDITED: same evening. I had a bowl of my soup straight, with some added salt. If I make it again I’ll add salt in the beginning It tasted fine, but it was more like a veggie stew than a soup.

For a second bowl I mashed the veggies and then added plain yogurt. Oh my, now that’s good. But also, I felt that the whole dish would have been improved with the addition of lentils early on. I think more potatoes would have been a good idea.

I’m too full now for a third bowl, so that experiment is for tomorrow. I’m going to run the soup through a blender and add the heavy cream instead of yogurt. Actually, I think I’ll add the cream (powdered) tonight so it’ll have a chance to blend in with the other flavors.

EDITED: next day. Oh boy oh boy oh boy. YUMMY! I can’t decide whether I like the yogurt version or the cream version better. I’ll have to make this soup again to find out because it’s all gone now!

Weight. Too much, too little — it seems to be a problem almost everyone has to deal with. For some it’s a matter of looking good. For some it’s because they want to achieve a goal that the weight issue gets in the way of. For others it’s about health.

John Ordover before & after

Whatever the reason, it ain’t easy to do what you’ve decided to do. I know from personal experience that when it comes to losing weight it’s damn hard to take it off and keep it off. And worse, the older you get, the harder it is.

I have a few friends who were significantly overweight and who decided to lose the excess pounds– and they did it. Not only did they lose those pounds, they shed lots of them. Each of them did it differently. None of them found it easy, but they did it. Because it can be done.

I’ve decided that no one method is right for every person, but that with enough effort and by finding what really fits for you and sticking with it, the excess weight can be a thing of the past. Finding that method can be tough, though. For one thing, if you try something and it doesn’t work, you can become discouraged enough to give up. And if you lose the weight you had in mind and it comes back and you have to do it all over again…

But let’s keep positive here.

My friend John Ordover has not only lost weight — a chunk of it — but he wrote a book about doing it (Lie There and Lose Weight, pre-order now for March 25 publication). You might find the answers you’re looking for by doing next to nothing.

LIE THERE AND LOSE WEIGHT
How I Lost 100 Pounds By Doing Next to Nothing
John J. Ordover

In the Fight to Lose Weight, Exercise is the Enemy…

…or so John Ordover discovered as he set out to lose one hundred pounds and recover his health. In this insightful, endearing and surprisingly funny look at weight-loss, Ordover takes us inside his struggle to stick with his diet, lays out the constantly changing strategies that kept him on target, and details how he coped when working out made everything that much harder.

Ordover’s week-by-week notes on his struggle, combined with his clever commentary and good-hearted grouching show how a sense of humor, focus and old-fashioned stubbornness kept him going week after week, month after month. Delightful and inspiring, in Lie There and Lose Weight: How I Lost 100 Pounds By Doing Next to Nothing, Ordover explains how he avoided the traps and temptations that threatened to knock him off track, and details how he lost over one hundred pounds while hating every minute of doing it.

These included:

Facing Hunger Straight On.

Avoiding Food Pushers, Food Pornographers and Diet Saboteurs

Telling Good Health Care from Bad

Praise for Lie There and Lose Weight: How I Lost 100 Pounds By Doing Next to Nothing by John J. Ordover

“Losing weight is hard for everyone, but few can write about it with as much warmth, humor and honesty as John Ordover does in this remarkable book. He takes us along as he loses more than a hundred pounds, relating every step of his journey with refreshing candor and insight. His experience should serve as an inspiration to anyone looking to lose weight and keep it off.”
– David K. Randall, New York Times Bestselling author of Dreamland.

About John J. Ordover
John J. Ordover is a noted editor, writer and activist, well-known for his expertise in the publishing community, work on the Star Trek franchise, for autism advocacy, and now for his personal account of losing the bodyweight of an adult human being. He lives in Brooklyn, NY with his beautiful wife, special needs education advocate and political activist Carol Greenburg, and his handsome and athletic son Arren.

Ordover has written television episodes and commercials, comic books and short-stories, and developed new marketing concepts while advising political campaigns and running fundraisers. Most days he can be found on Facebook, on twitter as
@quotableordover and answering reader questions on liethereloseweight.com.

National Media Tour
John Ordover regularly appears on local and national radio discussing a topics including special education, community activism, and genre fiction, and will now also be discussing both his personal weight loss experience, and strategies for losing weight and keeping it off. Wilder Publications will be expanding his presence to local and national morning and afternoon television.

I have a sad case of postpartum blues. No, I haven’t given birth to a squalling, pooping little bundle of joy, but I did send my manuscript — supposedly the final edit — off to my professional editor. Now I wait till she goes through it and (hopefully) tells me it’s good to go.

I thought I’d be bouncing around today with a big weight off my shoulders. Last night I couldn’t sleep for going through all the things I’d be free to do today now that I wasn’t shackled to my manuscript. My house looks like a crash pad. And why not? That’s basically what I’ve been doing for the past few months while I focused on this book.

Envelopes are piled up on my desk. I shudder to think what might be in them that I’ve been ignoring. Dirty clothes are spilling out of the laundry baskets. When was the last time I changed the bed sheets? Stacks of books I’ve used as references, or read in the evenings and never reshelved, or borrowed and never returned are on top of my sewing table. One the rare days when I felt like I had to swamp out the house but didn’t want to take the time, I just put things in empty Amazon boxes. Who knows what might lurk in them.

Ick, the cat boxes need emptying. No point in scooping. They’re beyond that – gotta just dump the contents and replace with fresh… um… I do have more kitty litter somewhere, don’t I? I did do dishes almost every day, but the clean ones are piled high in the dish drain. Why bother putting them away? I just kept using the same ones over and over. Other than baking a few loaves of bread, I haven’t cooked much of anything since Christmas. I can go a long time on peanut butter sandwiches, salads, and wine.
I look around the house and there is stuff everywhere! Not only stuff that needs to be put away, but projects that need to be completed. Fabric that I’ve purchased but not stored for the wall hangings I’ve started but abandoned. Houseplants that need repotting sit on windowsills and on the kitchen counter and on the floor. Tools that I’ve used to band-aide things that broke that I had no time to fix while I’ve been living in the dream world of writing need to be put away. And of course, the interior walls of my tiny little straw bale house still have not been plastered.

I have so much to do and now I’m free to do it.

But no. I’m sitting here feeling no motivation at all. I’ve got postpartum depression. I’ve had my creative baby, so to speak. The creation process took all my psychic energy and now I’ve hit the post-creation let-down.

Or maybe not.

Maybe it’s just the massive amount of work that I need to do to get my house back in order that is off-putting.

Today was the winter solstice, that is, the first day of winter. Here in my part of New Mexico it was all gale force winds and, well, wintery. I was chilly all day long. So naturally my thoughts turned to warmth: Warm layers, cozy fire, and a nice hot toddy.

Accordingly, on the way home from town I stopped in Western Drug and General Store, which really is an amazing place that sells just about anything a human being could want. My pretense was that I needed to pick up a birthday card (and I did do that, got a nice one) but I also wanted to get some whiskey because it seemed to me whiskey would make a proper hot toddy.

Now here’s the thing: While I don’t like the stuff, I feel like I should. Every damn mystery and science fiction book these days seems to have characters who drink single malt and double malt and hey — I love chocolate malts so shouldn’t I like whiskey?

So far, I never have. It tastes like paint thinner. Nasty, nasty stuff, no matter how aged it is and how many malts it is. Whatever that means anyway. But I had noticed a while back that Western had whiskey in little metal flasks (375 ml to be precise, but as a die-hard non-metricentric, it is little to me) and it was labeled Apple Crisp Whiskey.

Oh wow! I like apples! I like apple crisp (that is a dessert, isn’t it?). How bad could whiskey be if it was Apple Crisp Whiskey? And on top of that, the label also said America’s Finest. And a cute, candy-apple red metal flask!

Well, I had to have it. I had visions of an incredible hot toddy after the evening’s chores were done, the cozy fire blazing in the wood stove, me bundled up in my jammies and bathrobe. But no.

You knew that, right?

First hint: I could have sworn on the way home I smelled whiskey in the cab of the truck. And, well, yes, when I picked that flask up in the store, it did stick to the shelf it was on. But such a cute, candy-apple red metal flask it was, I had to have it! Probably some other flask had leaked, right?

The seal was still intact on the little tiny cap (so cute!). And maybe there were some kind of sticky droplets on the side of the pretty candy-apple red side of the flask, but that could have come from anywhere. At home I gave a moment’s thought to returning the flask unopened, since it seemed that maybe the flask wasn’t quite as full as it might have been but… no. I was determined to have that damn toddy. Tonight. The fire was roaring, I was warming on the outside and I wanted that hot comforting drink to warm my innards.

I opened it. I sniffed it. Kind of.. ewww. Paint thinner with a hint of rotten apple, overlaid with the tang of metal. I poured some hot water into a cup, added a big tablespoon of honey, and a slug or two of Apple Crisp Whiskey. Stirred well. Tasted.

Have I said ewww yet? I thought maybe I was mistaken. I mean, I never have liked whiskey or any of its relatives. So I took another sip to be fair.

But that metal taste. Really. Bad. In the lingering aftertaste I was sure it was less apple and more compost that coated my tongue, compost liberally tainted with steel. Was this the normal taste for something that claimed to be America’s Finest?

Traditional copper still. I sipped a bit more. No, definitely not pennies I was tasting, but steel. Remarkably mellow flavor and smooth finish… wait, what about the apples? I read the other side. Aha! Corn whiskey infused with apple crisp liqueur. Whatever that is.

Maybe I’m too picky. Or maybe I simply have an uneducated palate. But I think that maybe somebody accidentally put some kind of solvent in that flask and it’s dissolving the welds. Because I swear, I rinsed the outside off and dried it and there are sticky droplets along the seam again.

So… happy solstice. Winter has come. Meanwhile, I’m drinking Merlot, the fire is cozy, and after I recover from the toddy I’ll get my jammies on.